The impact of international migration on
development in migrant-sending areas of the southern and eastern
Mediterranean (Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey): A comparative
study.
June 2003 – December 2005
A postdoc funded by: WOTRO / NWO
Project
summary
The impact of migration on development in
migrant-sending communities has been the subject of heated debate,
between functionalist ‘migration optimists’ and structuralist
‘migration pessimists’, in which pessimistic views tend to
dominate. However, both functionalist and structuralist views on
migration and development have recently been challenged by more
pluralistic theoretical approaches, which point at the potentially
positive, but geographically differentiated, nature of migration
impacts.
Throughout the 20th century, many rural areas
in the southern and eastern Mediterranean witnessed mass migration
to international destinations. However, over the last two decades
of the 20th century, the study of migration and development in
this region was relatively neglected in comparison with the
research done in labor-exporting countries of Latin America and
Asia. This is unfortunate for both geographical and theoretical
reasons. It means that empirical work from one of the world’s
major labor exporting regions is absent from the contemporary
theoretical debate on migration and development.
Although new theoretical approaches towards
migration and development stress the spatial heterogeneity of
migration impacts, it is not clear what factors actually determine
this geographical differentiation. The research project aims to
address this issue of spatially differentiated migration and
development linkages by studying the impact of migration on
regional development in the southern and eastern Mediterranean
from a comparative and temporal perspective. In order to achieve
this goal, we are studying and comparing migration impacts on
development in four migrant-sending areas located in rural Morocco
(Todgha valley), Tunisia (Nefzaoua), Egypt (Fayyoum) and Turkey (Emirdag).
The aim of the study is to identify the principles that determine
the heterogeneity of the impact of migration on development in
migrant-sending areas. We aim to analyze what socio-cultural,
economic, institutional, and political factors determine
geographically differentiated migration impacts.
The fundamental question here is not whether or
not migration leads to certain types of development, but what are
the factors that determine whether migration has more positive
development outcomes in some migrant-sending areas and more
negative outcomes in others. This pertains not only to spatial
heterogeneity, but also to the differentiated impact migration may
have in the different domains of ‘development’ (e.g., education,
material and social well-being, culture, agriculture and other
economic sectors), as well as distributional (inequality on
different scale levels) and temporal dimensions (i.e.,
time-related issues such as ‘migration stage’) of migration
impacts.
The study is pursued through a combination of
extensive literature research, analysis of secondary data, and
fieldwork. The fieldwork entails participatory rapid appraisal,
open interviews and a small-scale, standardized survey among both
migrant and non-migrant households in all four areas.
